Macca, Ginsberg and Glass: Taylor's take

Former Beatle, New York cabbie turned composer and Buddhist bard: a musician with links to this circle provides some views on an intriguing artistic triangle

Earlier this month, we carried a story about Paul McCartney and his appearance in a BBC Radio 4 show called This Cultural Life. McCartney’s views on Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg formed part of the survey. A man familiar with that powerhouse triangle was Steven Taylor, a guitarist who became both Ginsberg’s accompanist and friend for 20 years and was also a very recent participant in our ‘Beat Soundtrack’ series. I asked him some questions about those artistic interconnections. He was kind enough to offer some personal insights…

Paul McCartney has been on a recent Radio 4 show, in which he talks about both Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass: positively in the case of Ginsberg, slightly less so – he thinks he's too highfalutin – in the case of Glass. What do you make of those positions?

Thanks for alerting me to that. It’s a good interview. He says, ‘Which one of their tunes can you whistle?’ He seems to be remarking how odd it is for Glass to have studied at some of the best music schools in America and with Boulanger in Paris and to then arrive, after long labour at the heights of the discipline, at a series of simple chords. It’s not a bad observation. But McCartney’s talking about tunes, which is his thing, not Philip’s. Glass is doing something else entirely.

There’s a bit in one of the Lennon biographies where Brian Epstein plays a recording of Ravel for Lennon, whose reaction is that it’s too long. The Beatles wrote pop songs. They didn’t read music, or study music outside of the popular song milieu of the early to mid-twentieth-century, which happened to be extraordinarily rich. They soaked up the best of it and finished it, in a sense, as has been said of Bach. He didn’t make anything new, but he summarised his era and finished it.

Pictured: Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg

McCartney says in the BBC interview that some people took him to see the composer Luciano Berio. The people were Barry and Sue Miles, and the date was February 24th, 1966. They had earlier played him a recording of a Berio piece that was a cutup of Joyce’s Ulysses with tape loops. Miles wrote that ‘Paul was more interested in the idea and the approach than in the actual piece.’ Miles says John Cage was an influence. McCartney said, ‘You don’t have to like something to be influenced by it’ (See: Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, p. 234; p. 237). The guy was like a sponge.

I know, of course, that Glass worked with Ginsberg on Hydrogen Jukebox, and I know that both McCartney and Glass contributed to 'Ballad of the Skeletons'. I'm also actually quite surprised you did not contribute to 'Ballad'. Was there any reason for that?

I don’t know what you mean by those guys contributing to the song and me not contributing to it. I don’t know that Philip had anything to do with the ‘Ballad of the Skeletons’, but maybe I missed something. Ah, now I see what you mean – the video. It’s probably that by then, ’96, I was based in Colorado. Maybe he got Lenny [Kaye] in because I wasn’t around. I don’t recall ever watching it.

Allen and I worked the song up to begin with. He must have had it on the harmonium, because it was mainly set on two chords when he showed it to me. This was the usual method. He always had the tune and the chords figured out for his songs before we rehearsed them into shape. He had a good melodic sense and was able to use the few chords he knew to vary the catalogue, but the ‘Ballad’ was just dull dull dull. It was long and monotonous, and I felt stupid playing it. But it was his new piece and, as was his wont, we had to play the new bit at every gig. I hated it.

When he asked me to play the Royal Albert with him, in October of 95, I declined, not because the ‘Ballad’ would be the inevitable bit, but because I was then teaching full-time and had already blown off my students for a couple of gigs early in the term. It wasn’t the last time that I was going to stick to the day gig rather than do something fab.

Allen told me he had arranged a substitute, and I couldn’t tell anyone who it was: it was a secret, and I was to fax instructions to this guy about the blesséd ballad, which I did. That Paul McCartney was willing to play two chords for five minutes under a thing with no melody perhaps says something about why 'es ‘im an’ i aint. I should have had that openness, and been less obstinate.

I just wondered if you had any brief take on Ginsberg's attitude to McCartney, Ginsberg's attitude to Glass and Ginsberg's feelings about Hydrogen Jukebox.

I don’t know that I can address that responsibly or realistically. It’s like second hand gossip or something. I know Philip through Allen, but I never met Mr. McCartney. But I knew Allen Ginsberg pretty well and I can say a couple things about what I think he thought from what he told me.

With McCartney, it starts with the Beatles, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ coming on the jukebox at Stanley’s bar in the East Village and everybody suddenly dancing. Allen described it to me as a kind of explosion of joy. Not his exact words, but the sense of it was sudden relief, pure delight, an ecstatic breakout from the post-war doldrums.

Allen met the Beatles in London in May of ’65, while hanging out with Dylan after having been ejected from Czechoslovakia. Later, post-Beatles, he had some connection with John and Yoko. He told me he was sometimes her date while John was in exile. They reconnected in 1976 after our session at Columbia with John Hammond, when we were recording First Blues. I played the session but split afterward, much to my next-day regret, because they met by chance on the street and spent an evening together. I got a bus to New Jersey; Allen got John and Yoko.

Allen and Paul connected personally, outside of the London social circle, later, I think. Linda McCartney was of course a photographer, and this was the period where Allen was getting serious about photography. He had always taken pictures, but in the '80s he got really serious, under the influence of Robert Frank, and also perhaps because he could then afford to get a Leica and a Rolleiflex and pay Robert’s friend Brian Graham to realise his images and show him the intricate art of printing with light.

He told me he had discussed photography with Linda. And he liked Paul’s paintings, of which he had a couple. Allen had a pretty sophisticated listener’s understanding of blues and jazz and the lineage of great popular music in his time, and he knew a lot of the principal movers (his stepmother introduced me to Gershwin’s mistress!), so getting to know McCartney went with the territory, like hanging out with Monk and Mingus, Dylan and Lou Reed and the Clash.

Then there’s the element of celebrity. Ginzy was a real star fucker, in the sense of being drawn to fame. I mean, you get to hang out and talk music and maybe jam with the best musicians of your time, and you get to feel the aura of unprecedented fame, and you want to be there. As I wrote to you earlier, he knew everybody. He introduced me to Muddy Waters and Dizzy Gillespie.

Allen looked at some of Paul’s poetry. You can see what McCartney says about that in Jerry Aronson’s documentary on Ginsberg, that Allen cut a lot of words, ‘like “the”.’ He thought the criticism misplaced because ‘I’m not American’. Allen said to me that it’s remarkable that here’s this great songwriter, so fluent and powerful in song, and the poetry’s not as strong. It must have been lacking in the Ginsbergian must-haves: energy, vividness. McCartney notes that Allen said ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was a great poem. That’s because it has the must-haves: sharp visual images, drive, and nary a wasted syllable. And it’s not about feelings; it’s all pictures, keen observation, the ‘face that she keeps in a jar by the door’. This part of Allen’s aesthetic comes from Olson and Pound: image, energy, and economy, condensare.

I haven’t read Paul McCartney’s poems, so I don’t know. But I’ve found that with some other songsters, you take the strictures of rhyme and meter away, and the impelling magic of a good tune, and there’s not much there. It’s just a different game. When a songster goes into free verse, it can be like you had a narrow, clear, powerfully flowing stream, and they take the banks away and it goes broad, shallow, and unmoving, and you wish you’d worn your wellies.

Allen didn’t understand Philip Glass’ music at first. We actually talked about that. He said Philip wanted to do something, and he asked me what I thought of the music. That would have been '88. I probably said something academic about minimalism. He didn’t know what to think of it.

But if he liked you, he would find a way to like your work. He did that with John Ashbery. He just could not understand what John was doing, but they became friends, so he had to expand his ear a bit. He asked John what he was doing, and Ashbery said, ‘I write the line and when it starts to make sense, I change the subject.’ Allen thought that was very funny. But he never did give up on poetry that didn’t switch the subject between lines, that spoke in an ordinary way, in W. C. Williams’ American vernacular. He told young poets to ‘put the heart back in it’, because in the '70s-80s, much of the new avant po coming from Ashbery’s followers was word salad. They were taking narrative apart. Some of it was sharp, or funny, but a lot of it, as is always the case with followers of a new trend, came off like a gimmick.

Allen took his cues from Charles Reznikoff’s ‘and each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound.’ What do you tell yourself when no one is around? That’s the poem. In his ‘Written in My Dream by W.C. Williams’, the elder poet-mentor tells him, ‘Listen to yourself talk to yourself and others will also, gladly relieved of the burden, their own thought and grief.’ You had to tell your story as if confiding in a friend, ‘to ease the pain of living, everything else drunken dumbshow.’ It’s like McCartney’s not being interested in Glass because there was no memorable tune in it. And the Beatles’ songs, particularly early on, were consciously addressed to the individual listener. It wasn’t ‘I’, it was ‘you’.

When Philip did that piece on ‘Wichita Vortex Sutra’, I think in ’88, that was the first collaboration, and it was just beautiful. That was the breakthrough for AG. The opening chord sequence sounds so American, like Aaron Copland, who was one of Philip’s influences. Then and subsequently, when I saw Philip play the piano on numerous occasions, I felt that I understood what he was doing. It’s also partly the Indian influence, building up all these overtones through repetition. It’s not the same on record.

In his last few years, Allen and Philip became close friends. They were like schoolboys together, it was heartening to see it, the two great men relaxed and happy in each other’s company. And they had a shared interest in Buddhism and Gelek Rimpoche.

I went to Hydrogen Jukebox with Allen at Brooklyn Academy of Music in ‘91. I think he was pleased, flattered. It still seemed new and strange, which was a healthy experience. The main thing was that he could hear his words. It would not be an exaggeration to say that whether he liked a setting of his poetry or not came down to that. Can the audience get every syllable?

Note: The original article to which this piece responds, ‘Class act? Melody maker’s Glass ceiling’, appeared in Rock and the Beat Generation on November 15th, 2021